Wikipedia:Signatures

[[Category:Wikipedia wp:sigs|Signatures]]

Signing your posts on Wikipedia talk pages is a guideline about the use of user signatures on Wikipedia. For instructions on how to sign your posts, see below.

Signing your posts on talk pages and other Wikipedia discourse (but not on articles) is not only good etiquette; it also facilitates discussion by helping other users to identify the author of a particular comment, to navigate talk pages, and to address specific comments to the relevant user(s), among other things. Discussion is an important part of collaborative editing as it helps other users to understand the progress and evolution of a work.

This is the most authentic and researched work done. I personally express my sincere thanks to the writer. The proofs are based on the proven history.

I belong to the said community "Sainthwar" and we are always classified as Rajputs warrior class.

Wikipedia should certainly keep this article to let people know about the correct history as per the available facts.

Rajesh Pratap Singh

singhrp11@gmail.com

Mob (GSM) : +91-9879610182

The purpose of signatures on Wikipedia

Signatures on Wikipedia identify you as a user, and your contributions to Wikipedia. They encourage civility in discussions by identifying the author of a particular comment, and the date and time at which it was made.

When signatures should be used

Any post made to user talk pages, article talk pages, or other discussion pages should be signed. Edits to articles should not be signed, as signatures on Wikipedia are not intended to indicate ownership or authorship of any Wikipedia article. In other instances when posts should not be signed, specific instructions are provided to contributors.

How to "sign" your posts

There are two ways to sign your posts:

1. At the end of your comments, simply type four tildes (~), like this: ~~~~.

2. If you are using the edit toolbar option (which must be enabled under Special:Preferences), click the signature icon () to add the four tildes.

Your signature will appear after you have saved the changes.

The end result is the same in both cases. Typing four tildes will result in the following:

Wikimarkup	Resulting code	Resulting display
~~~~	[[User:Example|Example]] 15:10, August 26 2024 (UTC)	Example 15:10, August 26 2024 (UTC)

Since typing four tildes adds the time and date to your resulting signature, this is the preferred option for signing your posts in discussions.

Typing three tildes results in the following:

Wikimarkup	Resulting code	Resulting display
~~~	[[User:Example|Example]]	Example

Since this does not date-stamp your signature, you may wish to sign this way when leaving general notices on your user page or user talk page. This is also a convenient shortcut (rather than typing out the full code) when you want to provide a link to your user page.

Typing five tildes will convert to a date stamp with the current date and time, without adding your signature, like this:

Wikimarkup	Resulting code	Resulting display
~~~~~	15:10, August 26 2024 (UTC)	15:10, August 26 2024 (UTC)

Note that if you choose to contribute to Wikipedia without logging in, you should still sign your posts. In this case, your IP address will take the place of your username.

Your IP address might look something like this: 192.0.2.58. Some users prefer to use their IP address instead of a user name because they think that an IP provides them with more anonymity. In fact, a pseudonymous account (that is, a registered user name) actually provides you with more protection of your identity.

Note also that signing manually with a pseudonym or tag such as --anon does not give you more anonymity or privacy protection, since your IP address will still be stored in the page history. This also makes it more difficult for other users to communicate with you. If you choose to sign this way, you should still type four tildes: --anon ~~~~.

See also: Automatic conversion of wikitext in Help.

Customizing your signature

Registered users can customize their signature by going to Special:Preferences and changing the field "Signature".

Most users choose a signature name that is either identical or closely related to their account name to avoid confusion. Signatures that obscure your account name to the casual reader may be seen as disruptive. Signatures must also follow our username policy.

Important considerations

A distracting, confusing or otherwise unsuitable signature may adversely affect other users. Some editors find it disruptive to discourse on talk pages, or when working in the edit window. Very long signatures that contain a lot of code ("markup") make it difficult for some editors to read talk pages while editing.

If asking another user to change their signature, remember to remain polite. If you are asked to change your signature, please avoid interpreting a polite request as an attack. As Wikipedia is based on working together in harmony, both parties should work together to find a mutually acceptable solution.

Signatures have been the subject of Requests for Comment, as well as resulting in some very heated debates. In one case, a user who refused to alter an unsuitable signature was ultimately required to change it by the Arbitration Committee (See -Ril-'s arbitration case).

When customizing your signature, please keep the following in mind

Appearance and colour

Your signature should not blink, or otherwise inconvenience or be annoying to other editors.

• Markup such as <big> tags (which produce big text), or line breaks (<br /> tags) are to be avoided, since they disrupt the way that surrounding text displays
• Be sparing with superscript or subscript. In some cases, this type of script can also affect the way that surrounding text is displayed
• Avoid making your signature so small that it is difficult to read
• In consideration of users with vision problems, be sparing with colour. If you must use different colours in your signature, please ensure that the result will be readable by people with colour blindness.

Images

Images of any kind should not be used in signatures.

Many concerns have been raised over the use of images in signatures, and they are considered to serve no use to the encyclopedia project. Images in signatures should not be used for several reasons:

• they are an unnecessary drain on server resources, and could cause server slowdown
• a new image can be uploaded in place of the one you chose, making your signature a target for possible vandalism and Denial-of-service attacks
• they reduce searchability, making pages more difficult to read
• they make it more difficult to copy text from a page
• they are potentially distracting from the actual message
• in most browsers images do not scale with the text, making lines with images higher than those without
• they clutter up the "file links" list on the image page every time you sign on a different talk page
• images in signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution

Language and alphabet

Signatures with non-latin script should also include latin script.

If your preferred signature consists of characters not in the latin alphabet (hànzì, for example), you should include latin characters also. This is because characters not within the ASCII character set may not display properly for everyone. This is a particular problem for people who use screen readers. This also makes it easier to search for your user name using the search function.

Length

Keep signatures short, both in display and markup.

Long signatures with a lot of HTML/wiki markup make page editing more difficult. A 200 character signature, for instance, is likely to be larger than many of the comments to which it is appended, making discussion more difficult:

• signatures that take up more than two or three lines in the edit window clutter the page and make it harder to distinguish posts from signatures,
• long signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution,
• signatures which have excessively long HTML/wiki markup and contain no spaces can cause a later editor's edit box to show an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar

Transclusion/template

Transclusions of templates and parser functions in signatures (like those which appear as {{User:Name/sig}}, for example) are currently impossible, because the developers have determined them to be an unnecessary drain on the servers. (Any template or parser function you enter will be substituted automatically.) Transcluded signatures require extra processing—whenever you change your signature source, all talk pages you have posted on must be re-cached.

Signature templates are also vandalism targets, and will be forever, even if the user leaves the project. Simple text signatures, which are stored along with the page content, use no more resources than the comments themselves and avoid these problems.

External links

Do not include links to external websites in your signature.

Mass posting of links to a particular website is strongly discouraged on Wikipedia. Posting a link to an external website with each comment you make on a talk page is usually viewed as linkspamming, or an attempt to improve your website's ranking on search engines. Therefore, signatures must not include external links. If you want to tell other Wikipedians about a good website that you are associated with, you can do so on your user page.

Dealing with unsigned comments

The templates {{unsigned}} and {{unsignedIP}} can be used at the end of an unsigned comment to attach the username or IP to the comment.

Wikimarkup	Resulting code	Resulting display
{{subst:unsigned|user name or IP}}	{{subst:unsigned|Example}}	— Preceding unsigned comment added by Example (talk • contribs)
{{subst:unsigned|user name or IP|date}}	{{subst:unsigned|Example|23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC)}}	— Preceding unsigned comment added by Example (talk • contribs) 23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC)
{{subst:unsignedIP|IP address}}	{{subst:unsignedIP|127.0.0.1}}	— Preceding unsigned comment added by 127.0.0.1 (talk)
{{subst:unsignedIP|IP address|date}}	{{subst:unsignedIP|127.0.0.1|23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC)}}	— Preceding unsigned comment added by 127.0.0.1 (talk) 23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC)

The template {{unsigned2}} does almost the same as {{unsigned}} when used with two parameters, but the ordering of the parameters is reversed. This is useful for copying and pasting from the edit history, where the timestamp appears before the username. {{unsigned2}} also automatically adds the (UTC) at the end.

Wikimarkup	Resulting code	Resulting display
{{subst:unsigned2|date|user name or ip}}	{{subst:unsigned2|23:59, 1 April, 2006|Example}}	— Preceding unsigned comment added by Example (talk • contribs) 23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC)

More about talk pages

See Wikipedia:Talk page for accepted conventions and guidelines regarding the use of talk pages.

See also

• Wikipedia:How to fix your signature
• Template:Tilde